This invention relates generally to vehicle charging.
An electric vehicle charging station, also called EV charging station, electric recharging point, charging point, or charge point and EVSE (electric vehicle supply equipment), is an element in an infrastructure that supplies electric energy for the recharging of electric vehicles, such as plug-in electric vehicles, including electric cars, neighborhood electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids. As electric vehicles and battery electric vehicle ownership is expanding, there is a growing need for widely distributed publicly accessible charging stations, some of which support faster charging at higher voltages and currents than are available from residential EVSEs. Many charging stations are on-street facilities provided by electric utility companies or located at retail shopping centers and operated by many private companies. These charging stations provide one or a range of heavy duty or special connectors that conform to the variety of electric charging connector standards.
With the growth of electric vehicle ownerships, the present infrastructure of EV charging stations would soon be unable to support charging EVs. Some electric utilities have reported numbers that indicate that even a single 220V charger within the circuit served by a transformer may, during peak consumption hours, overload and burn out the transformer. Therefore, the existing infrastructure needs to be upgraded both from a capacity standpoint as well as from a flexibility and power routing and control standpoint. While it is foreseeable that the infrastructure of EV charging would expand as to the number of power lines and the number of EV charging stations, there is also a need to improve charging of the individual EVs. For example, unlike the traditional gas stations, EV charging stations may not be expanded in areas due to constraints of a local power grid. Gas can be ported by a truck to wherever the gas station may be and stored, electricity may not be transmitted to EV stations above the capacity of the power grid. Therefore, there is a need to improve routing and scheduling of charging of the individual EVs through the EV charging stations.